For contemporary aircraft, an avionics ‘platform’ consists of a variety of elements such as sensors, sensor data concentrators, a data communications network, radio frequency sensors and communication equipment, computational elements, effectors, and graphical displays. These components must share information with other components over the data communications network.
Legacy incarnations of these platform elements are in the form of individual subsystem elements often referred to as “federated systems”. A federated system is an application-specific subsystem in a self-contained package having its own dedicated logic, processors, and input/output interfaces. Multiple and separated federated systems rely on common subsets of data sources, but lack the sharing of processing resources and interfaces among federated systems.
Previous efforts to reduce the reliance on federated systems resulted in the introduction of the ARINC 653 and ARINC 664 standards. ARINC 653 (A653) is a software specification for space and time partitioning in which an application, e.g., associated with a federated system function, is granted its own time slice partition and its own memory space partition in which to execute. ARINC 664 part 7 (A664) defines how commercial off-the-shelf networking components will be used for Aircraft Data Networks that enables what were multiple federated system functions to be hosted on a common processor and to share a common interface and wiring to an avionics data network.
In these systems, data is sampled, published, and transmitted at a higher frequency, and an application executing in an ARINC 653 partition is run more frequently in order to ensure that the results produced by an application have sufficiently low input-data-sample-time-to-processed-output delay. Both the frequency of data publication rate and the frequency of application execution tend to be higher than would otherwise be necessary if data and its processing were synchronized.
Systems on an avionics data network can utilize the data published on the network to perform processing functions for the aircraft. Example systems can include, but are not limited to flight control computers or aircraft health management units. The system can further include an end system or network interface unit configured to utilize a specialized data protocol of the avionics data networks defined by, for example, the A664 specification. The end systems include specialized hardware and software components that are designed to operate effectively and reliably with the avionics data networks, but are not optimized to operate efficiently with the processing functions of the systems.